Genius at work

A previous Nobel Peace Prize-winning president said his rule was “Speak softly but carry a big stick.” Theodore Roosevelt said he got the idea from a West African proverb.

The current Peace-Prize-winning president’s rule is “Bluster loudly but carry an unbelievably small stick.” It’s not clear where he got the idea — maybe from Secretary of State John Kerry.

Wherever it came from, it’s worked out so far.

More or less.

Sort of.

Roosevelt won his Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. It’s not entirely clear why President Obama won one in the early days of his presidency. Maybe it was awarded in advance, on the bet he’d pull off a diplomatic coup — as indeed he seem to have done now regarding Syria.

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Obama says his threat of a teensy-weensy, itsy-bitsy military strike scared the holy bejeebers out of Bashar Assad and Validmir Putin. Made them agree to relinquish Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. The duo gave the situation a little thought and apparently concluded: “Whoa. This guy’s another George Patton. Let’s not mess with him.”

Whatever their motivations and calculations, the two have spared Obama from having to defy American polls and his own party’s peace-at-any-price wing and enforce his “red line” with a Tomahawk missile strike.

The two may also have spared the world (at least for the time being) an implosion of the Assad regime, sweeping al Qaeda types into the power vaccuum and setting off a regional chain-reaction diasaster such as Sen. John McCain and some other chest-thumping Republicans seem to greatly favor.

Didn’t Obama’s fan club — and indeed Obama himself — tell us all along the guy’s a genius?

The genius of his Tomahawk diplomacy is that it moves the Syria mess onto a back burner, maybe well into somebody else’s future presidency.

How long will it take to work out the endless details on methods of taking an inventory of vast stocks of chemical weapons now srpead out over countless sites in a country with lots of remote, empty space for hiding things?

How long to actually do the inventory, never mind verify it and destroy the weapons? Odds are that the Cubs will have won a World Series by then.

There are many devils in these myriad details — not the least of which is that the U.N. Security Council will oversee the process, and Russia and China have a Security Council veto.

Meanwhile, it’ll be back to creating millions and millions of high-paying jobs with good benefits and dispensing medical miracles under ObamaCare.